The most rewarding part of my work with the Concentration in Catholic Social Tradition is the group of students who have entered the program. I have been asked what characteristics, if any, these students share. They are a quite diverse group, running the full gamut of majors. Other than the fact that a good number come from western Pennsylvania (is it the Allegheny mountain air?), the quality that marks these students is that they view their anticipated professional lives — and their lives as a whole — as vocations.

By "vocation" I mean something quite simple, though it is not easily carried out. A vocation is a life activity through which a person works out in a deliberate fashion her or his relationship with God and neighbor. Most adults have multiple vocations, such as work and family. It also includes those activities generally described as "avocations," from needlepoint and fly fishing to regular service at a soup kitchen.

Many Catholics do not undertake the process of attempting to live the social teachings. In John Paul II's words, "It must be asked how many Christians really know and put into practice the principles of the church's social doctrine." The question arises as to why. The answer that stands out most clearly is that many Catholics do not understand their work lives and their lives as a whole as vocations; they do not understand themselves as people called.

The next question, of course, is, "Why don't they?" The answer here is also obviously complex, but two factors are worth discussing. The first is an excessively narrow understanding of "religious vocation," limited to members of formally instituted orders. The Second Vatican Council's Dogmatic Constitution on the Church responds to this understanding by articulating the "Universal Call to Holiness." Through baptism, all members of the Church "are really made holy. Then, too, by God's gifts they must hold on to and complete in their lives this holiness which they have received." By "holiness," the Council means the activity of "seeking the will of the Father in all things, devoting themselves with all their being to the glory of God and the service of their neighbor." There are different vocations, but all are called: "In the various types and duties of life, one and the same holiness is cultivated by all who are moved by the Spirit of God."

The Council document goes on to state that all who work "should by their human exertions try to perfect themselves, aid their fellow citizens and raise all of society, and even creation itself, to a better mode of existence." It is clear that the Council does not understand holiness as disconnected from activity in the world. "By this holiness a more human way of life is promoted even in this earthly society."

Remnants of the narrow understanding of holiness remain in our everyday language about the Church. They appear, for instance, in ads that ask, "Do you have a vocation?" The intent is to ask, "Do you have a call to an instituted order?" but what is conveyed is also, "If you do not, then you do not have a vocation. You are doing something else." The person who thinks, "I do not have that specific calling," also thinks, "Then I must not have a calling at all." This is largely inadvertent on everyone's part, but the effects are real. "I am not called to that, so therefore I must not have a calling."

The second factor is what might be called "the Catholic workerization of Catholic social teaching." In the absence of specific knowledge of Catholic social teaching and against the backdrop of a commonly-held, narrow understanding of holiness, laypersons have searched for models, and that of Dorothy Day and the Catholic Worker movement have for many people filled the void. The problem — other than that there are a number of often unacknowledged discontinuities between official teaching and Day's writings — is that the result is again narrow. Across the country in Catholic "Peace and Justice" advocacy centers there are numerous pictures of Day (itself good), but few of, say, the owner of the Malden Mills factory who continued to pay his employees after the factory burned down and rehired them when a new one was built. Persons not called to Day's degree or type of self-abnegation interpret this fact as having no vocation at all. "I am not called to that, so therefore I must not have a calling." Work becomes something one does to earn an acceptable amount of money and Catholic teaching is what one does once a month at the soup kitchen.

In earlier columns, I have critiqued Michael Novak's departure from Catholic teaching, but he is on target on one thing in particular: the way in which one earns one's money can and ought to be understood as a vocation. Still, Novak is exactly right, for instance, that entrepreneurial activity — or, better, rightly ordered entrepreneurial activity — can be "holy" in the way described by the Council. One way to interpret Novak's writings is as an overreaction to the Catholic workerization of Catholic social teaching.

One does not need to distort the teaching to bring it back to its center of gravity. Such a vocation is not easy, but the ways are there, ready to be at once followed and created.

Todd Whitmore is an associate professor of theology.

The views expressed in this column are those of the author and not necessarily those of The Observer.

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